Digital Camera News Archives at DCResource.com

If this is your first visit, please read the description from Monday about our new site! We've got lots of news for today -- note that we won't be updating the news until Saturday, due to the holiday. Have a safe (and turkey-filled) weekend!

Norman Camera (highly recommended by many users we've heard from) has the Fuji DS-7 for $299, the lowest price we've seen. This camera is the same as the Apple Quicktake 200, with a different software bundle.

Late addition: Fry's Electronics (at least in San Diego) have the Kodak DC20 for only $117, a savings of $73.

Our first day was quite successful! We had over 3,700 visitors to the home page in the first 18 hours, and a few hundred registered users in the message boards. Between my three sites (powerwatch, lostworld, dcrp) we raked in over 17,000 visitors yesterday! I was able to add some reviews of cameras, including many Mavica and Quicktake 200 reviews.

Don't blow off the idea of the message boards right away. Unlike the USENET, our boards have multiple discussions, no spam, and lots of friendly people to help answer your questions. And, if you have a camera you want to sell (or if you're looking to buy one), try our DCRP Classifieds board. The message boards on PowerWatch turned out to be extremely useful-- you don't want to miss out on it here, either!

We're going to do our best to look ahead to new innovations related to digital photography, and one which looks promising is Iomega's clik! drive. These little disks are less than 2" square, will cost under $10, and hold 40MB! That's enough for 40 pictures from the D-600L in SHQ mode! A MacWeek story has more, and if any camera manufacturers jump on the clik! bandwagon, you'll hear it here first!

One camera that seemed to slip through our Comdex report yesterday is the Olympus D-850L, described in a News.com article. All I could get out of it was that it was megapixel, cost $799, and will ship in the near future. If you have more info, let us know.

Welcome to the Digital Camera Resource Page! Today is our opening day, and we hope that your impression of this site today will make you a regular visitor! We think you'll find our content and sense of humor helpful, and hopefully not too harmful! Before we get to the daily news, let me give you a run down on what's on this site, and why you should check it out! Before we go on, let me say this: Delane and I are human, we make mistakes. Be nice-- send your comments, complaints, and corrections to corrections@dcresource.com. Remember we are unofficial-- we're doing this out of the kindness of our hearts, and we're not trying to make you buy anything!

News Snapshot (you are here), will feature the latest news on cameras and photo printers. It will be updated every day, as long as there is news to report! What kind of news are we looking for? New product announcements. Price drops. Magazine reviews. General site news. It'll all be here!

Reviews & info features a large (100+ cameras!), sortable list of cameras, with stats on each camera, plus end user (and DCRP staff) reviews and sample photos! If things look a little bare now, that's because we need YOUR input! Use our handy form to review your camera today! We also have links to magazine reviews (from ZDnet and CNET) for you to browse, too!

Message boards the DCRP version of PowerWatch Views (for those who know what that is.) This is really the heart of the site-- where users can interact in our forums! We have forums which tackle those "Which one to get" or "Where to buy?" questions, as well as manufacturer specific forums too! Note that you MUST register for an account-- no guests are allowed in the forums. You can rest assured that your name and e-mail address will NEVER be given to ANYONE.

The links page features links to websites of both the manufacturers themselves, as well as retailers that sell cameras. As our reviews come in, we'll be adding ratings of the various resellers based on end-user experience!

About the DCRP has info on the site and its authors. Great background reading.

So what's news today? Well, first, some news from Comdex last week. (If you
have more to add, please write to news@dcresource.com).

LG Electronics USA (Goldstar) introduced their LDC-F20 camera, which takes up to 62 640x480 images on its 2Mb of
built in memory (it's upgradable to 4Mb). In addtion, it has a 1.8" LCD and
NTSC video out. Pricing and availability is not known at this time.

Pretec Corp, a Taiwan-based company, released their
DC-600 camera. Some of its features include 640x480 photos, 1.8" LCD, 2Mb
CompactFlash card, and a very small form factor. It'll ship in January; Price info wasn't available.

Ricoh CPG announced their RDC-300Z camera, which appear to be an upgrade to their RDC-300 model. It features a 350,000 pixel CCD, 3X zoom, 640x480 photos, 2Mb SmartMedia card, auto-everything, and includes PhotoStuidio Lite. It'll be available for $599 in the first quarter of 1998.

Sharp Electronics new VE-LC2
camera was shown at Comdex as well. It features a 2.5" LCD, a detachable
optical viewfinder (to save battery life), IrDA support, 4Mb of internal memory (30-120 images), a rotating lens, video out, and low light functionality. It will come with EasyPhoto software in Janury for $499.

Finally, Phillips Electronics has jumped
into the digicam world with their new ESP2 camera and VCP1 printer. The
camera ($429) features 4Mb of internal memory(25-100 photos), 640x480
resolution, a 1.8" LCD, flash, and time and date on each photo. One feature
that Jeff likes is the fact that you can fully cover both the lens AND the
LCD.. I've been too worried about damaging both on my D-600L. The camera is the same as the Ricoh RDC-300. As for the $429 printer, it's a dye-sublimation printer (Mac and PC compatible) that takes 120 seconds to do its work, on 4x6" paper. Both should be
available in time for the holiday shopping season.

One of the hottest cameras of the season is the Olympus D-600L. It must be, since both Delane and myself bought one. I finally got the chance to take it for a spin to Disneyland (one of my favorite haunts, as you'll learn) so checkout the photos. If you want to see a raw picture, in HQ mode, see the Swan photo. Also, finding SmartMedia is very difficult (well, it is for me) -- if you can find it, let us know-- this is the kind of thing we hope to track for you all!

ZDnet is doing a fairly comprehensive article reviewing digital cameras in a new magazine called "ZD Equip". The printed version is supposed to be out in a few days. The online version in early December. We'll let you know when it shows up!